8 ms·

Expressive Writing Cools Brain on Stressful Tasks

151 points by happy-go-lucky 9y ago

fsiefken 9y ago
That's why keeping a journal or diary can be helpful as well. http://newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/writing-in-a-diary-can-reduce-83950 http://newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/writing-in-a-diary-can-redu... Or alternatively, the Ignatian daily examen: http://www.ignatianspirituality.com/ignatian-prayer/the-examen http://www.ignatianspirituality.com/ignatian-prayer/the-exam...
copperx 9y ago
This study gives credence to the GTD's book claim that putting all of your tasks in an "inbox" reduces stress, which was the only worthwhile insight I got from it.
- alexilliamson 9y ago
  What about the two-minute rule for processing said inbox? Or defining projects as TODO's that require more than one step to complete? The GTD book has been a gold mine for me.
- DenisM 9y ago
  Speaking of GTD - if you found the book impossible to read, consider watching this video version: https://www.lynda.com/Business-Skills-tutorials/Getting-Things-Done/170776-2.html https://www.lynda.com/Business-Skills-tutorials/Getting-Thin...
  - asciimo 9y ago
    Great link! I found it very possible to read; I read it at least 2.5 times across multiple physical and digital copies of two editions. Turning the words into actions is the hard part for me. Surely this is the format that's going to work :)
    - TeMPOraL 9y ago
      For me, turning the words into actions was the easy part. The hard part was sticking to the habit of doing weekly reviews. I always fail at this after few weeks, and if you don't do weekly reviews, suddenly the whole GTD methodology falls apart on you and you have to start over...
      - terminalcommand 9y ago
        Same here. The only thing I apply from GTD is that if the task can be done under 5 minutes do it. Making todo lists and sticking to them require too much discipline. In my professional life I keep todo lists, reminders etc. But in my personal life I'm a lazy lazy person. I can't seem to find a solution to this.
        mattmanser 9y ago
        I write daily to-do lists either in the morning or the night before, on a small post-it note sized stack of paper. Throw it away at the end of the day, whether or not I finished everything. I try and be realistic and still usually end up with 1 or 2 tasks not done. It's nice crossing things off, it also never gets out of control. Of all the things I tried in my personal life to get more things done, this is the one that's generally worked. I still go through phases of not doing it but it's really easy to start doing it again as the stack is always on my desk. The other thing that works very effectively for me, much like this article says, is occasionally when feeling overwhelmed I write down everything that's stressing me out in a temporary text editor (an unsaved notepad++ note, which remains between computer restarts). I include things like "I'm pissed off with Bob because he did X" or "I'm worried about client Y not being able to pay their bill" or "I feel like I'm not putting enough time into doing Z". I almost immediately stop stressing about it, and generally end up closing the unsaved note after a week or two, usually without reading it again. When I do, most of the stuff I was worrying about turned out fine.
ordu 9y ago
Is it writing did the trick, or any verbalization will do? Maybe all you need is to spend 8 minutes on thinking about task?
- fernly 9y ago
  I think the point is to externalize the concerns. If you only think about them, they are still "on your mind", whereas if you write them down, they are in a conceptual external storage and you can stop thinking about them.
- fsiefken 9y ago
  There are cognitive benefits to talking to an imaginary person. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/08/smarter-living/benefits-of-talking-to-yourself-self-talk.html?mcubz=0 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/08/smarter-living/benefits-o... http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2017/05/the-perks-of-talking-to-yourself.html http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2017/05/the-perks-of-talking-to...
  - userbinator 9y ago
    Sometimes it doesn't have to be a person, or even alive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging
chicago_wade 9y ago
I have also found that it helps to put swear-words in the commit messages when I'm struggeling a lot with something. Once I get to that point I will stop working on that specific problem until the next day, but swearing about it in the commit message helps me not think about it anymore and also when I come back to it the next day I can see from the commit what I was struggeling with. Obviously only do this for repositories that you aren't sharing with anyone. You could also do it in a shared repo if you don't push the commits and you squash them first. Personally I'm not a squash kind of person and I'd also fear that I pushed without remembering to squash even if I really were planning on squashing.
- scroot 9y ago
  See: [1] [1] http://www.commitlogsfromlastnight.com/ http://www.commitlogsfromlastnight.com/
  - oolaf 9y ago
    This is what the world is built on
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Tade0 9y ago
In my former job I kept a secret "project shitlist" detailing my feelings about the worst parts of the codebase(usually 8-year old technical debt). Now I see that they were actually pretty tame. Here's an example: Variables used before declaration because "code style".
- foota 9y ago
  What language is this where you can use a variable before declaring it?
  - ghusbands 9y ago
    Javascript allows it.
    - yulker 9y ago
      Does it actually allow it? I thought the declaration is just hoisted to the top of the scope?
      - colordrops 9y ago
        It is hoisted at runtime. There is no compile/transpile step that physically moves the declaration to the top, so syntactically the declaration can be after variable usage.
      - faizshah 9y ago
        I just recently read about this in the You Don't Know JS series of books: "We can be tempted to look at var a = 2; as one statement, but the JavaScript Engine does not see it that way. It sees var a and a = 2 as two separate statements, the first one a compiler-phase task, and the second one an execution-phase task. What this leads to is that all declarations in a scope, regardless of where they appear, are processed first before the code itself is executed. You can visualize this as declarations (variables and functions) being "moved" to the top of their respective scopes, which we call "hoisting". Declarations themselves are hoisted, but assignments, even assignments of function expressions, are not hoisted. Be careful about duplicate declarations, especially mixed between normal var declarations and function declarations -- peril awaits if you do!" https://github.com/getify/You-Dont-Know-JS/blob/master/scope%20%26%20closures/ch4.md https://github.com/getify/You-Dont-Know-JS/blob/master/scope...
randomdrake 9y ago
I enjoy expressively writing to cool off sometimes, so I was interested in checking out the study itself. The link to the actual study from 2017/09/08 can be found here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28884815 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28884815 "The effect of expressive writing on the error-related negativity among individuals with chronic worry." > The error-related negativity (ERN), an ERP elicited immediately after errors, is enlarged among individuals with anxiety. The relationship between anxiety and enlarged ERN has spurred interest in understanding potential therapeutic benefits of decreasing its amplitude within anxious individuals. The current study used a tailored intervention-expressive writing-in an attempt to reduce the ERN among a sample of individuals with chronic worry. Consistent with hypotheses, the ERN was reduced in the expressive writing group compared to an unrelated writing control group. Findings provide experimental support that the ERN can be reduced among anxious individuals with tailored interventions. Expressive writing may serve to "offload" worries from working memory, therefore relieving the distracting effects of worry on cognition as reflected in a decreased ERN. The study is not shy about what conclusions should and shouldn't be drawn from it. There is large "Limitations and future directions" section. Here are some excerpts: > Although the current study sheds light on the utility of expressive writing in reducing the ERN among worriers, there are limitations that should be addressed in future studies. > First, the samples size (N540) was rather small for a between-subjects investigation, and, unfortunately, this is the rule rather than the exception in comparable cognitive neuroscience studies (Holmes & Pizzagalli, 2010; Klawohn et al., 2016; Olvet & Hajcak, 2012) > Second, we examined the ERN only after participants engaged in the writing and were therefore unable to assess how these processes changed from before to after writing. > Third, we did not include a low-worry control condition. The purpose of the present study, however, was to provide a very specific test of the effects of expressive writing on the ERN in individuals with chronic levels of worry. Indeed, we meant to build upon the prior study that tested the effect of attention bias modification on the ERN (Nelson et al., 2015) by examining high-anxious individuals instead of college students sampled without regard for anxiety symptoms. > Fourth, because we utilized a student sample, it would be useful to examine the effects of expressive writing on the ERN in clinical samples in future studies. However, as we detailed in Method, the individuals in our sample reported worry symptoms that were comparable to previous studies of patients with GAD, and by using a well-validated measure in the PSWQ, it is likely that many of our participants had GAD. Moreover, college students are not immune to psychopathology.
Chiba-City 9y ago
We used (enforced) a writing method for software developers of three categories: So Far, More To Go, Save It For Later. It was something like a personal Kanban board for project members sharing a real schedule in weekly compiled/tested feature deliveries. This was a visibility feature for schedule and release rationalization. There were no Hail Mary pass negotiations or requests permitted. The prose mattered and project leads were forced to read them. It was not anything that could be rushed at the end. "Save it for later" kept team time boxed and synchronized and gave managers features to schedule for future version releases and sales messaging. We fired people who could not write English right alongside their Java and PL/SQL. It worked great. 100% project completion over 125 projects. I attribute it to HR weeding out ADHD gamers suffering bad grammar of inadequate educations needing paychecks. Software is 100% a product of communicative action. There are few excuses for execution failure absent bonafide academic grand challenges.
- asciimo 9y ago
  There's some dry satire.
- bartread 9y ago
  "We used (enforced) a writing method"; "project leads were forced to read them"; "We fired people who could not write English right alongside" (emphasis mine in all cases). Forgive my bluntness, but your place of work sounds awful. "I attribute it to HR weeding out ADHD gamers suffering bad grammar of inadequate educations needing paychecks." Ironic, considering how poorly constructed this sentence is. You treat people like children and they will act like them. Let me reiterate: your place of work sounds terrible.
  - Chiba-City 9y ago
    Smart clever people loved racking up resume win after win with high profile clients. Liking it is not in your job description.
    - dvt 9y ago
      > Liking it is not in your job description. Of course it is. Culture is very important to one's job. In fact, if you don't like you're job, you're not going to do a good job. Some companies make millions off of that premise (see Bonusly). I actually completely agree with the idea of prose being written alongside technical requirements, but the work environment (and your tone) sound god-awful. And for what it's worth, I'm a gamer.
atdt 9y ago
Study: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/psyp.12990/abstract http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/psyp.12990/abstra... The sample for the experiment is N = 40
mikegerwitz 9y ago
I enjoy literate programming in part for some of the benefits this article describes. Even if the documentation is separate from the program, sometimes escaping into writing for a while provides a sufficient amount of relief to just get back into hacking. Since the matter is related to the task at hand, it also helps me to organize my thoughts and be better prepared (and therefore less stressed) to re-introduce myself to the problem. I also use hand-written notes. This allows me to escape a screen entirely, write candidly about whatever I please, and naturally reform the stress into something workable.
fuzzfactor 9y ago
Seems to work for me, hurricane or not.
AndriiKH 9y ago
I absolutely agree with the article. I personally keep a daily journal and it helps me a great deal - relieve stress and everything. Kinda cool for productivity as well. You just vizualize things when you write and then have not so many problems actually doing them.
nine_k 9y ago
"If you can't explain what you're doing to a 6-year old, you don't know it yourself" (ascribed to several famous physicists). This is pretty true, and thus the exercise of explaining things in plain prose is very useful to make you polish your understanding, and find any problems in it. When hand-waving is not acceptable, problems in understanding become very visible. Even if nobody reads this, it's very useful if node honestly. Having other people to read it just keeps you from slacking off.

That's why keeping a journal or diary can be helpful as well. http://newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/writing-in-a-diary-can-reduce-83950 http://newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/writing-in-a-diary-can-redu... Or alternatively, the Ignatian daily examen: http://www.ignatianspirituality.com/ignatian-prayer/the-examen http://www.ignatianspirituality.com/ignatian-prayer/the-exam...

copperx 9y ago

This study gives credence to the GTD's book claim that putting all of your tasks in an "inbox" reduces stress, which was the only worthwhile insight I got from it.

alexilliamson 9y ago
What about the two-minute rule for processing said inbox? Or defining projects as TODO's that require more than one step to complete? The GTD book has been a gold mine for me.
DenisM 9y ago
Speaking of GTD - if you found the book impossible to read, consider watching this video version: https://www.lynda.com/Business-Skills-tutorials/Getting-Things-Done/170776-2.html https://www.lynda.com/Business-Skills-tutorials/Getting-Thin...
- asciimo 9y ago
  Great link! I found it very possible to read; I read it at least 2.5 times across multiple physical and digital copies of two editions. Turning the words into actions is the hard part for me. Surely this is the format that's going to work :)
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    For me, turning the words into actions was the easy part. The hard part was sticking to the habit of doing weekly reviews. I always fail at this after few weeks, and if you don't do weekly reviews, suddenly the whole GTD methodology falls apart on you and you have to start over...
    - terminalcommand 9y ago
      Same here. The only thing I apply from GTD is that if the task can be done under 5 minutes do it. Making todo lists and sticking to them require too much discipline. In my professional life I keep todo lists, reminders etc. But in my personal life I'm a lazy lazy person. I can't seem to find a solution to this.
      - mattmanser 9y ago
        I write daily to-do lists either in the morning or the night before, on a small post-it note sized stack of paper. Throw it away at the end of the day, whether or not I finished everything. I try and be realistic and still usually end up with 1 or 2 tasks not done. It's nice crossing things off, it also never gets out of control. Of all the things I tried in my personal life to get more things done, this is the one that's generally worked. I still go through phases of not doing it but it's really easy to start doing it again as the stack is always on my desk. The other thing that works very effectively for me, much like this article says, is occasionally when feeling overwhelmed I write down everything that's stressing me out in a temporary text editor (an unsaved notepad++ note, which remains between computer restarts). I include things like "I'm pissed off with Bob because he did X" or "I'm worried about client Y not being able to pay their bill" or "I feel like I'm not putting enough time into doing Z". I almost immediately stop stressing about it, and generally end up closing the unsaved note after a week or two, usually without reading it again. When I do, most of the stuff I was worrying about turned out fine.

ordu 9y ago

Is it writing did the trick, or any verbalization will do? Maybe all you need is to spend 8 minutes on thinking about task?

fernly 9y ago
I think the point is to externalize the concerns. If you only think about them, they are still "on your mind", whereas if you write them down, they are in a conceptual external storage and you can stop thinking about them.
fsiefken 9y ago
There are cognitive benefits to talking to an imaginary person. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/08/smarter-living/benefits-of-talking-to-yourself-self-talk.html?mcubz=0 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/08/smarter-living/benefits-o... http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2017/05/the-perks-of-talking-to-yourself.html http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2017/05/the-perks-of-talking-to...
- userbinator 9y ago
  Sometimes it doesn't have to be a person, or even alive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging

chicago_wade 9y ago

I have also found that it helps to put swear-words in the commit messages when I'm struggeling a lot with something. Once I get to that point I will stop working on that specific problem until the next day, but swearing about it in the commit message helps me not think about it anymore and also when I come back to it the next day I can see from the commit what I was struggeling with. Obviously only do this for repositories that you aren't sharing with anyone. You could also do it in a shared repo if you don't push the commits and you squash them first. Personally I'm not a squash kind of person and I'd also fear that I pushed without remembering to squash even if I really were planning on squashing.

scroot 9y ago
See: [1] [1] http://www.commitlogsfromlastnight.com/ http://www.commitlogsfromlastnight.com/
- oolaf 9y ago
  This is what the world is built on

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

Tade0 9y ago

In my former job I kept a secret "project shitlist" detailing my feelings about the worst parts of the codebase(usually 8-year old technical debt). Now I see that they were actually pretty tame. Here's an example: Variables used before declaration because "code style".

foota 9y ago
What language is this where you can use a variable before declaring it?
- ghusbands 9y ago
  Javascript allows it.
  - yulker 9y ago
    Does it actually allow it? I thought the declaration is just hoisted to the top of the scope?
    - colordrops 9y ago
      It is hoisted at runtime. There is no compile/transpile step that physically moves the declaration to the top, so syntactically the declaration can be after variable usage.
    - faizshah 9y ago
      I just recently read about this in the You Don't Know JS series of books: "We can be tempted to look at var a = 2; as one statement, but the JavaScript Engine does not see it that way. It sees var a and a = 2 as two separate statements, the first one a compiler-phase task, and the second one an execution-phase task. What this leads to is that all declarations in a scope, regardless of where they appear, are processed first before the code itself is executed. You can visualize this as declarations (variables and functions) being "moved" to the top of their respective scopes, which we call "hoisting". Declarations themselves are hoisted, but assignments, even assignments of function expressions, are not hoisted. Be careful about duplicate declarations, especially mixed between normal var declarations and function declarations -- peril awaits if you do!" https://github.com/getify/You-Dont-Know-JS/blob/master/scope%20%26%20closures/ch4.md https://github.com/getify/You-Dont-Know-JS/blob/master/scope...

randomdrake 9y ago

I enjoy expressively writing to cool off sometimes, so I was interested in checking out the study itself. The link to the actual study from 2017/09/08 can be found here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28884815 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28884815 "The effect of expressive writing on the error-related negativity among individuals with chronic worry." > The error-related negativity (ERN), an ERP elicited immediately after errors, is enlarged among individuals with anxiety. The relationship between anxiety and enlarged ERN has spurred interest in understanding potential therapeutic benefits of decreasing its amplitude within anxious individuals. The current study used a tailored intervention-expressive writing-in an attempt to reduce the ERN among a sample of individuals with chronic worry. Consistent with hypotheses, the ERN was reduced in the expressive writing group compared to an unrelated writing control group. Findings provide experimental support that the ERN can be reduced among anxious individuals with tailored interventions. Expressive writing may serve to "offload" worries from working memory, therefore relieving the distracting effects of worry on cognition as reflected in a decreased ERN. The study is not shy about what conclusions should and shouldn't be drawn from it. There is large "Limitations and future directions" section. Here are some excerpts: > Although the current study sheds light on the utility of expressive writing in reducing the ERN among worriers, there are limitations that should be addressed in future studies. > First, the samples size (N540) was rather small for a between-subjects investigation, and, unfortunately, this is the rule rather than the exception in comparable cognitive neuroscience studies (Holmes & Pizzagalli, 2010; Klawohn et al., 2016; Olvet & Hajcak, 2012) > Second, we examined the ERN only after participants engaged in the writing and were therefore unable to assess how these processes changed from before to after writing. > Third, we did not include a low-worry control condition. The purpose of the present study, however, was to provide a very specific test of the effects of expressive writing on the ERN in individuals with chronic levels of worry. Indeed, we meant to build upon the prior study that tested the effect of attention bias modification on the ERN (Nelson et al., 2015) by examining high-anxious individuals instead of college students sampled without regard for anxiety symptoms. > Fourth, because we utilized a student sample, it would be useful to examine the effects of expressive writing on the ERN in clinical samples in future studies. However, as we detailed in Method, the individuals in our sample reported worry symptoms that were comparable to previous studies of patients with GAD, and by using a well-validated measure in the PSWQ, it is likely that many of our participants had GAD. Moreover, college students are not immune to psychopathology.

Chiba-City 9y ago

We used (enforced) a writing method for software developers of three categories: So Far, More To Go, Save It For Later. It was something like a personal Kanban board for project members sharing a real schedule in weekly compiled/tested feature deliveries. This was a visibility feature for schedule and release rationalization. There were no Hail Mary pass negotiations or requests permitted. The prose mattered and project leads were forced to read them. It was not anything that could be rushed at the end. "Save it for later" kept team time boxed and synchronized and gave managers features to schedule for future version releases and sales messaging. We fired people who could not write English right alongside their Java and PL/SQL. It worked great. 100% project completion over 125 projects. I attribute it to HR weeding out ADHD gamers suffering bad grammar of inadequate educations needing paychecks. Software is 100% a product of communicative action. There are few excuses for execution failure absent bonafide academic grand challenges.

asciimo 9y ago
There's some dry satire.
bartread 9y ago
"We used (enforced) a writing method"; "project leads were forced to read them"; "We fired people who could not write English right alongside" (emphasis mine in all cases). Forgive my bluntness, but your place of work sounds awful. "I attribute it to HR weeding out ADHD gamers suffering bad grammar of inadequate educations needing paychecks." Ironic, considering how poorly constructed this sentence is. You treat people like children and they will act like them. Let me reiterate: your place of work sounds terrible.
- Chiba-City 9y ago
  Smart clever people loved racking up resume win after win with high profile clients. Liking it is not in your job description.
  - dvt 9y ago
    > Liking it is not in your job description. Of course it is. Culture is very important to one's job. In fact, if you don't like you're job, you're not going to do a good job. Some companies make millions off of that premise (see Bonusly). I actually completely agree with the idea of prose being written alongside technical requirements, but the work environment (and your tone) sound god-awful. And for what it's worth, I'm a gamer.

atdt 9y ago

Study: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/psyp.12990/abstract http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/psyp.12990/abstra... The sample for the experiment is N = 40

mikegerwitz 9y ago

I enjoy literate programming in part for some of the benefits this article describes. Even if the documentation is separate from the program, sometimes escaping into writing for a while provides a sufficient amount of relief to just get back into hacking. Since the matter is related to the task at hand, it also helps me to organize my thoughts and be better prepared (and therefore less stressed) to re-introduce myself to the problem. I also use hand-written notes. This allows me to escape a screen entirely, write candidly about whatever I please, and naturally reform the stress into something workable.

fuzzfactor 9y ago

Seems to work for me, hurricane or not.

AndriiKH 9y ago

I absolutely agree with the article. I personally keep a daily journal and it helps me a great deal - relieve stress and everything. Kinda cool for productivity as well. You just vizualize things when you write and then have not so many problems actually doing them.

nine_k 9y ago

"If you can't explain what you're doing to a 6-year old, you don't know it yourself" (ascribed to several famous physicists). This is pretty true, and thus the exercise of explaining things in plain prose is very useful to make you polish your understanding, and find any problems in it. When hand-waving is not acceptable, problems in understanding become very visible. Even if nobody reads this, it's very useful if node honestly. Having other people to read it just keeps you from slacking off.